Recently I encountered a situation where the backup drive was short of space on the production server. The policy on the production server was that as soon as soon as the Full Backup is complete, a copy of the production backup is transferred to the staging server using RoboCopy and then on the staging server […]

In the event that a transaction log grows to an out-of-control size, shrinking it can be the only solution – but don’t rush to do this until you are aware of the consequences. Shrinking the log could ‘break the log chain’ – rendering the existing transaction log backups useless. When this happens, the most recent […]

When dealing with the performance database any detail should can never be neglected, because even the smallest thing can turn out to be a great opportunity for query optimization. Generally, one needs a significant amount of experience to detect that kind of details easily. But what shall the rest do till they gain the required […]

Pre-requistes To execute a package programatically you need to have basic knowledge of either C# or VB which are both object oriented languages. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or higher needs to be installed along with SQL Server 2008 or higher. Introduction Most of us are pretty familiar with SSIS package development as well as deployment. […]

Extended Events were introduced in SQL Server 2008 as a light-weight monitoring mechanism. Most DBAs typically use SQL Profiler to monitor and analyse SQL Server events. However, SQL Profiler is not a lightweight tool and consumes too many resources for use in a production environment. In SQL Server 2008, Extended Events can only be configured […]

In the first of this four part series I gave an overview of the tools and techniques of query optimization in SQL Server. In this second part, I will talk about the process of displaying and interpreting query execution plans. I will also talk about how to generate query execution plans using SQL Server Management […]

Performing a Database Restore is a part of a DBA’s daily life. A DBA may need to perform a Restore due to various reasons such as recovery, refreshing a database for testing purpose etc. Many times it can be difficult to perform a Restore due to corrupted media, low disk space on the server and […]

In my last article we saw the basics of the data warehousing in which we saw looked at how OLAP and OLTP technologies differ in their functionalities, what were the models being used to develop the data warehouse and what were the schemas under consideration for designing the data warehouse. In this article I will […]

Recently, I encountered a case where the Transactional Replication between our Production OLTP server named XYZ and Reporting database server named PQR went out of sync. Both the servers were located in the same Data Centre in the USA. The Reporting database was used by the users in Canada for fetching the data from the […]

In the first of this four part series I will give an overview of the tools and techniques of query optimization in SQL Server Most of the activity of the database server is related to queries. Because of this, query optimization is often a major concern. SQL Server tries to optimize query performance itself, but […]